NASA GES DISC Downloader Example

In this example we'll download NASA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) data from the NASA GES DISC site.

To download data from the NASA GES DISC site you will need a NASA Earthdata account. You will also need to sign the End User Licensing Agreement for the NASA GESDISC data archive.

Download the nasa_ges_disc_downoader.exe artifact. You can get the latest release here.

1. Browse to the NASA GES DISC site. Search for "GPM":

2. Select the GPM IMERG Final Precipitation v.06 30 minute dataset:

3. Select Subset / Get Data:

4. Select a subset of the data. In this case I selected dates for September 2017. I drew a spatial subset polygon over the continental United States. I selected the calibrated precipitation parameter: precipitationCal. I selected the HDF5 file format.

5. Select Download links list to get a text file of links. Save the links list to a local directory. I saved mine to C:/Temp/gpm.

6. Now use the NASA GES DISC Downloader utility to download links from the list. For this example I put a copy of nasa_ges_disc_downloader.exe in C:/Temp/gpm.

Program arguments are:
-l, --path_to_links : text file having list of download links
-d, --destination : download location of files
-u, --username : NASA Earthdata username
-p, --password : NASA Earthdata password
-n, --threads : amount of threads for download

An example command:

nasa_ges_disc_downloader -l=C:/Temp/gpm/subset_GPM_3IMERGHH_06_20191022_174009.txt -d=C:/Temp/gpm -u=majortom -p=rocketman321 -n=10

Be sure to use your credentials for username and password. You can execute the command from the command line or create a batch script.

After executing the command, files should start downloading:

Once the files have downloaded, you can read data in to HEC-DSS with vortex.